COVID-19: Why is it so dangerous?

written by @ajain and @rgov - astute political observers

In the last blog, I talked about the true mortality rate of the Corona Virus. In this blog, I will talk about the reasons why Corona Virus is particularly dangerous and why we must take any and or preventive measures to contain the spread of this disease.

1. High Speed of Transmission

The speed of transmission is measured through “Transmission Coefficient” which is the rate that disease moves from infected individuals to susceptible individuals in the population. It must be between 0 and 1 for the disease to be self-contained or contained locally. Given below are the transmission coefficient of some common airborne diseases (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_reproduction_number). I have also included Ebola since many people are quoting this in mainstream media not realizing that Ebola is not an airborne disease.

It is clear from the above data no major outbreak in recent years compares to the Corona Virus when it comes to the speed of the spread of the disease. So when mainstream media and many on alternative media talks down about the seriousness of the Coronavirus by comparing it to influenza please educate them.

2. Non-Availability of Vaccines

The reason we don’t hear about Rubella, Mumps and Smallpox these days is that they have been effectively contained via vaccines. SARS (original strain) vaccines are already past clinical trials. For Coronavirus vaccines clinical trials are yet to begin and it may take up to 12 months to be fully tested and deployed. Can you imagine what can happen in 12 months considering that since January 2020 when it was made known worldwide (even though China had its first case on November 17, 2019) we have over one and a half million people infected?

3. High Mortality rate

SARS virus, the most contagious one in recent times, saw only 778 deaths with a total of 8.098 infections worldwide (source: https://www.cdc.gov/sars/about/faq.html). Compare this to over 83,000 deaths that we have seen in just the last four months with infected person count approaching 1.5 million with the peak of spread yet to come. The mortality rate at a global level (as mentioned in the last blog) is close to 20% with the UK leading the pack with an expected mortality rate of 97%! Italy has a mortality rate of 41% and the USA is not far behind with the mortality rate of 37%. It is not a surprise that President of the USA (Mr. Trump) mentioned in one of his White House briefing that the USA should expect a death count of between 100,000 and 250,000. He mentioned these figures when the total death count in the USA was about 7,000. He is aware of the danger of Corona Virus and so should we be and follow the guidelines to prevent the spread of the disease such as social distancing, wearing masks in public, washing hands with soap and water frequently, cough on elbows and not touching the face.

4. Wrong Advice by WHO

Governments take preventative measures based on the advice of the World Health Organization (WHO). In this case, WHO not only delayed providing the advice, it gave wrong advice resulting in a widespread of the disease in a very short amount of time. In January of 2020 WHO came out saying that there is no evidence of human-to-human transmission of disease. When several countries such as Russia, the USA and India started to seal the borders in March 2020, WHO criticized these nations and encouraged travel to and from China. The key victim of it was Italy and Italy being a tourism hub, soon became the epicenter for spreading the disease across the globe.

5. Governments slow to respond

As recent as a fortnight ago countries like Sweden and Switzerland encouraged its citizens to be normal and disregard the social distancing norms suggesting that social distancing “suffocates its citizens”. New York and California states of the USA provide a stark contrast of response. New York was very slow to respond and not until very late announced “shelter-in-place”. New York still had public transport running on nearly full capacity. Can you imagine what New York metros packed with humans as Sardines can do in a situation like this? California, on the other hand, issued “shelter-in-place” way early and ordered everybody to wear masks when outside of their homes. As a result, New York today leads the world in terms number of infected cases (over 149,000) and deaths. California, on the other hand, is a distant fourth with 17,815 cases. (source: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/).
India and Russia led the pack with announcing a total lock-down as early as March 24, 2020. Jordan, Poland, Brazil, Norway, and the Philippines are also a few exceptions taking stringent measures such as country-wide lock-down and launching social awareness campaigns. Other countries such as the UK, France, Italy, and Spain are only now enforcing lock-down. The USA with the highest number of cases still hasn’t announced a national lock-down.

Finally, the real danger comes from the gut feeling that something is fishy about this whole situation. Here are a few questions that are keeping me awake at night:

1. When China discovered the first case on November 17, 2019, why did it delay informing the WHO till the time when the satellite data clearly showed a total production shutdown in December 2019 suggesting some major problems?
2. When WHO was informed why did it delay declaring it as a pandemic and why did it issue wrong guidelines such as travel restrictions should be lifted and that there is no evidence of human to human transmission?
3. Why did some Chinese citizens stood on popular Italian tourist spots with a placard “I am human, not a virus”? Why did the Italian governor encourage people to hug these Chinese citizens?
4. How come the spread of this disease in China was restricted only to Wuhan and no other cities were impacted in a major fashion despite strong connectivity with cities like Beijing and Shanghai?
5. How come after exponential growth in spread China experienced a sudden drop to zero in new cases?
6. How come the recovery rate in China is 96% whereas the rest of the world is struggling to contain the deaths?
7. When China knew of this disease why did it allow its citizens to travel aboard during the Chinese New Year which was celebrated between January 21, 2020, and February 20, 2020? It is estimated that some 500,000 Chinese citizens visited the USA alone during this period and that is when the USA started seeing the count rise.
8. How come China didn’t have the need to use the Personal Protection Equipment (PPE) donated by many countries during the outbreak? If China didn’t need the equipment why did it request for them?
9. How come the number of mobile users in China dropped by a whopping 8 million during January despite claiming only 3,333 deaths? (source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-23/china-s-mobile-carriers-lose-15-million-users-as-virus-bites)
10. How come there are no signs of increased production activity(emission data as captured by satellites) in China despite claiming no new cases for almost a month?
11. Why is Bill Gates in the forefront for projecting the data and timelines instead of medical institutes?